Robert Ashley

Kyle Gann

Publication Year: 2012

This book explores the life and works of the pioneering opera composer Robert Ashley, one of the leading American composers of the post-Cage generation. Ashley's innovations began in the 1960s when he, along with Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, and David Behrman, formed the Sonic Arts Union, a group that turned conceptualism toward electronics. He was also instrumental in the influential ONCE Group, a theatrical ensemble that toured extensively in the 1960s. During his tenure as its director, the ONCE Festival in Ann Arbor presented most of the decade's pioneers of the performing arts. Particularly known for his development of television operas beginning with Perfect Lives, Ashley spun a long series of similar text/music works, sometimes termed "performance novels." These massive pieces have been compared with Wagner's Ring Cycle for the vastness of their vision, though the materials are completely different, often incorporating noise backgrounds, vernacular music, and highly structured, even serialized, musical structures. _x000B__x000B_Drawing on extensive research into Ashley's early years in Ann Arbor and interviews with Ashley and his collaborators, Kyle Gann chronicles the life and work of this musical innovator and provides an overview of the avant-garde milieu of the 1960s and 1970s to which he was so central. Gann examines all nine of Ashley's major operas to date in detail, along with many minor works, revealing the fanatical structures that underlie Ashley's music as well as private references hidden in his opera librettos._x000B_

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

Illustrations

Preface

I may have first seen the name Robert Ashley in David Cope’s
book New Directions in Music, which I read in high school and which describes
his notorious piece The Wolfman in the “Anti-Music” chapter: “The recording of
this work . . . constitutes ear...

1. “Oh, How We Misunderstand” (Introduction)

That’s opera? The voices chant ecstatically on one pitch,
echoing and overlapping in almost unintelligible profusion. The piano beats out
a sporadic, dissonant pointillism, though the background electronics reinforce
an immobile tonality, a frozen ritual, an...

2. “The Vessel of the Eternal Present” (The Early Years)

To a remarkable extent, Robert Ashley is the unofficial
token composer of Ann Arbor, Michigan. It’s a college town; the University
of Michigan has a distinguished music department, and many famous composers
have taught there. Ashley...

3. “When Slow Starts to Mean Something, We Crave Fast” (The ONCE Years)

What Ashley refers to as “the glorious chaos of the 1960’s”1
started for him years before it hit the culture at large. Before the Beatles became
famous, before the Vietnam protests, before “flower power” and love-ins and
men with long hair, the young composers of Ann Arbor launched boldly into a
provocative new era. From the outset...

In the 1960s Mills College was a women’s college, and on
the undergraduate level it remains so today. The head of the composition program
was the distinguished French composer Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), best known
for having made some of the first use...

5. “I’m Not the Same Person That I Used to Be” (Perfect Lives)

At this pivotal point we will do well to generalize about
Ashley’s mature conception of opera from Perfect Lives on. It is a completely individual
conception: no other composer has ever shared it, though some younger
ones (including “Blue” Gene Tyranny...

6. “Who Could Speak If Every Word Had Meaning?” (Atalanta (Acts of God))

While Ashley was at Mills College, he would frequent
a series of concerts in Berkeley by a group called the Arch Ensemble, run by
Thomas Buckner. Buckner (b. 1941) was a New Yorker from a well-to-do family
who had gone to Yale and, at nineteen...

7. “If You Have to Ask You Can’t Afford One” (Now Eleanor’s Idea)

The five-and-a-half-hour tetralogy Now Eleanor’s Idea
(1985–94) represents the conclusion of the American adventure, of Ashley’s “history
of our consciousness as Americans.” If Atalanta represented the life of European
immigrants in the eastern...

8. “One Thing Follows the Next and I Just Do It” (Dust, Celestial Excursions, Concrete, and Smaller

When i interviewed Ashley in 1991 prior to the New York
premieres of Improvement and el/Aficionado, he astounded me by telling me he
had already created the narrative framework for his next fifty operas. What that
meant, it turned out, was that he...

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